We started out with grateful thanks to Whitehall for standing in for the original fixture (Avoncroft) at short notice ………a glance at the scorecard highlights that our hosts certainly made their presence felt. Usual ‘Whitehall rules’ of 25 and retire, everyone bowls 2 and no lbw.

Hook a duck for the batting order had conjured up an ‘interesting’ line up – highlights included Gav at 10 and Marcus on season debut at 11.

Skipper DDH had been practising calling ‘heads’ but was taken by surprise when ‘the toss’ turned out to be ‘guess which hand the money’s in’……………….fancy calling ‘left’ in Worcestershire!
Bowling first on a belter…………..but given the bar hadn’t opened was probably a good outcome.

No shoe bingo, so skipper had the luxury of carefully manipulating the bowling order.

Gav (off his full run up) delivered the first pie of the evening and the startled driver of an SUV in the car park went home with a duke shaped dent. Fair play though – the first over saw off their dangerous opener (retired). We’ll pretty much skip through most of the rest of the bowling apart from James (2 overs for 4 runs), George Dawes (2-10), Waz (2-16) and Chairman (2-15)………………and DDH 2-12 with 3 wickets thrown in.

Do the maths with Whitehall whacking up 208 and you can envisage the carnage to get to 208 (10.4 an over).

Half time, ………….must be the first time ever that ‘specialist’ batters 1,2 & 3 had zippo batting gear between them. But left hand boxes and borrowed bats saw the ‘well-seasoned’ openers stride confidently to the middle safe in the knowledge that our Hungarian international would be following soon.

10 an over? A doddle for 1 & 2 (chairman 27 off 16; Habib 25 of 19 both retired) – not much to this batting lark.

Rich was DDH’s first run out sacrifice of evening when skipper spotted he’d slipped – golden opportunity to replace him with Ade (29 off 18 - retired). Déjà vu for James – same error same result …run out whilst lying down. Skipp then got done by a straight one (24 off 18) and brought the wily combination of Nokia & Weed (22 off 22) to see us home….. as the rate climbed.

Last roll of the dice as we (too late) found out that Waz could bat as well as bowl – but that’s the fun of hook a duck. His 12 off 3 balls was in the backdrop of needing 36 off the last over. Scoring 9.25 an over to lose was quite an achievement.